Read Part One HERE
In this post I continue to focus on a woman named Sarah Grimke. She lived from 1792 - 1873.
Sarah studied constantly until her parents learned that she was planning on going to college with her brother Thomas, which was, of course, impossible in the first decade of the 1800s. Thereafter, Sarah's parents forbade her to study her brother's books. Instead, she received an education from private tutors on subjects like reading, writing, simple math and social etiquette. Young women might also be taught music, needlework, cooking and nursing, to be used in their daily lives as wives and mothers. Her father supposedly remarked that if Sarah "had not been a woman, she would have made the greatest jurist in the world."
The Grimke family attended the Episcopal Church, where Sarah read Bible stories to slave children. From the time she was twelve years old, she also spent her Sunday afternoons teaching Bible classes to the young slaves on the family plantation. While she wanted desperately to teach them to read the Scriptures for themselves, her parents admonished her that teaching slaves to read had been against the law in South Carolina since 1740.
Still Sarah secretly taught her personal slave to read and write, but when her parents discovered the young tutor at work, the vehemence of her father was alarming, He was furious and nearly had the young slave girl whipped. Fear of causing such trouble for the slaves prevented Sarah from teaching any others.
Read Part Thirty-Two HERE
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